Tim Harney

Dialogue and Correspondences  

A Selection of Collages 1987-2017

October 19th to November 19th, 2017

Tim Harney's career as an artist and a teacher spans five decades; he has been making collages for more than thirty years. Tim works with paper, especially old paper, deploying shapes animated by patches of vivid color to create a visual language. Each of his collages has a syntax, a rhythm, and a meaning particular to itself, as if each were a poem. And, as with poems, Harney's collages are distillations of emotion and memory, in which layering, fragmenting, and reconstruction suggest the passage of time and the act of recollecting. Embedded in his choices of shape, pattern, and color are multiple associations, redolent of his thought processes and of the art and artists who have influenced him. This show, he says, "isn't simply a selection of work from these many years, but also a range of work that I feel reveals some sense of what a deep involvement and continual dialogue means to the work, and how the vocabulary has evolved. One of my interests in presenting this work was to make the point, obvious maybe - that there are rich consequences from an involvement this long: the incalculable number of decisions, rejections, changes of direction, varied vocabularies are all informed by a dialogue over years."